I just heard the eurobeat-remix version of Harry Belafonte’s Day-O:
Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana…
[thump-thump-thump-thump]
It was kinda catchy, actually ;).
Category: music
Techno Internet Radio
I haven’t brought my CD player in to work yet (when you have to leave for work at 7:30am, mornings always seem to be a rush), so I was jonesing for some music this afternoon.
Figuring that I wouldn’t mind hearing some non-mainstream, a quick Google search turned up Digitally Imported, which has all kinds of techno — trance, hard trance, hard house, eurodance, and so on. I listened to eurodance for a while, and I’m listening to hard house at the moment — but they’re both very good.
If it weren’t for the poor audio quality of streaming MP3s (compared with Redbook CD audio), I would be half-tempted to leave my CD changer at home and just try streaming Internet radio for a while ;).
PS If you have any techno or melodic death metal streaming-radio stations to recommend, please post them in the comments :).
Songs in Commercials
From a thread on MetaFilter, songs in commercials are becoming a phenomenon all their own — Cadillac is even becoming popular with some younger buyers due to their use of a Zepplin song in an ad.
There’re also websites that help people figure out the artists that performed songs heard in commercials. At first, I was happy to discover SongTitle.info as there’s one song from a GMC Yukon commercial that I’m still trying to track down (the commercial featured the hulking beasts driving in choreographed circles, synchronized-swimming style).
SongTitle has an entry for “Our Day Will Come” by Ruby & The Romantics (with a link to a sound sample) for the Yukon. But, after listening, I ruled that one out. I don’t hold it against SongTitle, but I suppose they just don’t have the details for that particular commercial.
Even Volkswagen has a CD of collected songs from its commercials. Some of the more obvious ones — such as Mr. Roboto — are on there, but I may just get it to discover some new techno artists (good techo is just so hard to find these days).
Air Guitar Championships
As mentioned on MetaFilter, Zac ‘Mr. Magnet’ Monro has won the 7th Annual Air Guitar World Championships (in Oulu, Finland) for the second year in a row. Video of his winning performance is also available.
I watched the video and, while good, I thought it could have been better. I must concur with one of the MetaFilter comments:
Uh-Huh…
If you’re gonna play air guitar, you should at least try to simulate chord changes by switching fingers and moving your hand up and down the “neck” of the guitar, as it were.
Then there’s the whole issue of whether on not to use an air pic or whammy bar…
10,000 Fake Band Names
When Brian Whitman was working on a paper on the human evaluation of artist similarity, he needed a way to eliminate bad results — “robots, users just clicking randomly, and people that didn't know the bands presented”.
So, he wrote up a quick script to generate band names for him. Ten thousand names later, they’re now listed on his webpage. Some of my favorites:
- Track Botanical
- Toad Shin
- Roulette Defenestration [you knew I would include that one ;)]